Robert B. Parker’s the Hangman’s Sonnet

Surprisingly, they’d gotten more information from Deanna than they had from their earlier visits. She was very fond of her time in Paradise with Maude, and Maude had been fond of her.

“Maude’s husband had died a few years earlier and they never had children. I missed my family terribly and so we spent a lot of time together. She would tell me about her family’s history. She was very proud of what they had done for Paradise.”

Jesse took out his phone and showed Deanna the ring. “Did Maude ever mention—”

Deanna lit up. “She loved that ring. She even let me try it on once. God, it was beautiful.”

“So she didn’t keep the ring a secret,” Molly said. “Other lodgers knew about it?”

“No, I don’t think so. She swore me to secrecy. She said I was the only person she had ever shown it to, certainly the only person she had ever let try it on.”

Jesse asked, “Do you remember any of the other people staying there while you lived with her?”

Deanna’s expression did an about-face, souring. “There was one asshole, Evan. He gave Maude a hard time. He was always high, drank a lot, but he seemed to have a lot of money. So whenever Maude asked him to leave, he would pay her off. As nice as her house was and as rich as her family had been, she was pretty broke. I didn’t like that she let him stay, but I understood it. She needed the money. When he tried breaking into my room one night, she threw him out once and for all.”

After that there wasn’t much more for them to discuss. Deanna said that she and Maude had kept in touch for a while afterward, but once Deanna had a family of her own, their conversations grew less frequent.

“I hope you find the ring,” she said to them as they were leaving. “She was a woman who didn’t care about wealth, but she did love that ring.”

49

Back at the station, Molly was digging into the oldest of the composition notebooks, looking for Evan. It wasn’t much of a lead. It wasn’t at all clear that it was a lead at all. For a woman like Deanna Banquer to refer to someone as an asshole and for him to stick out in her memory made him worth a little investigation. Unfortunately, the world, even in the mid-seventies, was full of people like this Evan character. But Jesse and Molly agreed that from this point forward they wouldn’t be rushing around Massachusetts to do in-person interviews unless they first got more substance on the phone.

Molly seemed so preoccupied by Maude Cain’s notebooks that Brian Lundquist thought she might not have noticed him come through the station door, but when he tried to scoot by her he was proven wrong.

“Where do you think you’re going?” she said, never looking up. “Just because you’re a big-shot statie now doesn’t mean you just get to walk into Jesse’s office.”

“Sorry, Molly. You looked busy.”

“I am. Is it important?”

He waved a file at her.

“Come with me.”

She knocked on Jesse’s pebbled-glass door and stuck her head into his office.

“What?”

“Lundquist is here.”

“Get anywhere with this Evan guy?” Jesse asked.

“Not yet.”

“Okay, send him in.”

Lundquist came in and sat across the desk from Jesse and waved the file at him as he had at Molly.

“Full array of photos and forensics. Your man Perkins is good. Our guys said he did a first-rate job with the scene. Our guys don’t drop compliments easily.”

“I’ll let Peter know. How about the index card?”

Lundquist pulled out several enlargements of areas of the index card, came around to Jesse’s side of the desk, and laid them out on the blotter.

“See here, Jesse, these dark brown patches? This is old cellophane tape residue. There were still some traces of the actual tape on the card. The lab says the tape is at least forty years old. And here, these indentations in the card that the lab highlighted, what’s that look like to you?”

“A key.”

“A safety-deposit box key, to be precise,” Lundquist said.

“These numbers are the number of the box.”

“That’s the presumption.”

“But what bank?”

Lundquist frowned. “Good question. See this.” He pointed to an enlargement of the top left corner of the index card found in King Curnutt’s rear pocket. “It’s been torn here. Our best guess is that’s where the name of the bank was probably written. In the meantime, we’ve sent all this to the FBI lab in the hope they’ll be able to match the shape of the key and the number to the bank.”

Now it was Jesse frowning. “Don’t hold your breath. It will take months before they get to this. And when they do, the best they’ll be able to do is to come up with the manufacturer of the key and a list of banks that might have used that type of key and lock. We’re talking forty years ago.”

“At least forty years. Maybe more.”

Jesse asked, “Can your guys create a key from this?”

“I don’t see why not. You mind me asking what for? We don’t even know that this has anything to do with the case.”

“I think we do. Look, Curnutt’s body didn’t have ID, money, a cell phone, or car or house keys on it. Only this old index card. So he either had it on him or the killer planted it on him.”

“You’re right, Jesse. But—”